Flashback Friday - Quarriors! - Love It or Hate It? Do You Still Play It?
Love it or hate it? Do you still play it?
Quarriors!, published in 2011, was the first "Dice Pool Building Game," modeled on the deck building genre but substituting dice for the cards. It was a huge hit, winning Origins Award for “Best Family, Party or Children’s Game” in 2013. It recieved 5 expansions and was eventually the basis for the Dice Master series.
A new edition, Quarriors!: Qultimate Quedition, which includes the base game and all five expansions, is scheduled for release later this month, which seems to indicate that Quarriors! remains popular.
But what do you think? Love it? Hate it? Did you ever play it? Do you still play it?
More on Quarriors!
Then I played it. Once.
Thankfully it was not me who spent money on that snooze.
At Origins 2011 it was getting huge buzz, and I made sure to try it out - and I was incredibly underwhelmed. Felt like I was saying the emperor had no clothes.
My big issue was that it had double-randomness. To get a combo working, you had to pull the right set of dice out of your bag (like in Dominion), and then had to roll the right sides on the dice (decidedly not like Dominion).
So trying to get combos and dice synergies into your bag is basically pointless - the combos are so rare to trigger that your best strategy is to just buy the best individual die you can each turn, and not worry about what else you have.
When Mike was on I brought this up as a design concern - and he flatly refused to acknowledge it. He said that it was absolutely the same as putting combos together in Dominion. And I could not convince him otherwise. It got a little uncomfortable until I just moved on.
Here's a link if you're interested: ludology.libsyn.com/episode-13-cc-gs-db-gs
Josh Look wrote: It’s merely ok at best. Once Dice Masters came out, it became clear that this was just a warmup.
Dice Masters has a huge following at my local game store. I haven't seen Quarriors played in years. I gave away my copy long ago.
Geoff is right that the primary issue is the difficulty in getting logical combo buys to proc and pay off Having the two buys and forcing you to decide whether to score or keep the doe does leave just enough decision-making for me to enjoy.
Puzzle Strike, my deck-builder du jour, was in between editions at the time. I had already paid for the laser-engraved wood chip special edition that we later found out would be completely incompatible with expansions and future revisions of the game, and despite that, I had already ordered the new cardboard edition as well. I wasn't ready to gamble on a new deck-building game like Quarriors where people thought the base set was cool but that it really needed some expansions.
Seven years later, my SO and I love Puzzle Strike... and Quarriors is still a dumb name.
They didn’t. They made it longer, and even more random. I simply refuse to play the game now, especially when considering that any version of King of Tokyo does it better.
I haven’t played in years at this point, but I did really enjoy it at the time and got a lot of fun out of it.